Intangibles, Investment, and Efficiency

The severity of the global financial crisis tended to obscure lower frequency macroeconomic trends over the last several decades. Recent work examining the slow recovery from the financial crisis emphasizes trends in productivity and investment that predate the crisis itself (Gutiérrez and Philippon 2017b, Alexander and Eberly 2017, Fernald et al. 2017). In particular, weakening investment amid strong cash flow and valuation is a feature of both the early 2000s and the post-crisis period. At the same time, the distribution of economic activity seems to be changing, as evidenced by increasing concentration of business output and the falling labor share (Autor et al. 2017).